Pinterest Marketing for Ecommerce Businesses: How to Drive Traffic From Pinterest

Pinterest is the ultimate visual search engine and the world’s catalog of ideas, and it’s the only social media platform that enables users to plan for the future rather than share the present or reflect on the past. With a Pinterest for business account, brands can create and manage a Pinterest marketing strategy that boosts brand awareness and drives traffic and conversions to their website. In this article, we discuss in detail what Pinterest marketing offers brands in terms of marketing power and what a Pinterest for business account can do for a business and their bottom line.

In this article, we assume that you already understand the basics of Pinterest like what a pin is, how to create boards and how to save pins, and so we’ll be jumping right into how you can set up a Pinterest for business account and exactly what you need to do to get your Pinterest marketing strategy started.

Let’s jump right into Pinterest for business and Pinterest marketing strategies.

Pinterest for Business

To start off with, using Pinterest for business purposes is something that Pinterest itself has spent time, effort and energy optimizing, and they’ve made it very easy for businesses to understand how to use Pinterest for business. Using Pinterest for business purposes is slightly different from most social media platforms and also slightly different from search engines like Google, so it’s important to approach your Pinterest marketing strategy a little bit differently as well.

Think of Pinterest as a way to grow consumer awareness and traffic to your site, rather than as a platform to directly acquire customers and sales. While using Pinterest as a marketing platform can boost customer acquisition and sales to your site, it shouldn’t be the only way you use it from a marketing perspective.

As detailed in this article, Why Pinterest is 1,680 Times Better than Facebook, pins are so much more discoverable on Pinterest than other social platforms and for so much longer, which is what makes the platform so advantageous for businesses to use. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, whose posts have a half-life (the time in which the post accumulates half of all its interactions) measured in minutes, the average half-life of a Pinterest post is three and a half months. Because the life of pins lasts so much longer they have a greater potential reach, so businesses can use Pinterest to interact with users much earlier in their purchasing process.

As discussed in this article from Pinterest, Tips for Creating Customer Growth on Pinterest, so many online marketing tactics focus on reaching customers who already know what they want to buy, but Pinterest is the optimial platform for businesses to use to influence customer purchasing choices before they even know what they want to buy yet.

In short, Pinterest is the perfect place to start your sales funnel from. With Pinterest pins, you can build awareness around your brand and products, develop consumer interest, and increase traffic, but then you can also use Pinterest to boost in-store and online sales and influence users to take actions like sign-up to, purchase and install products.

The end goal of using Pinterest for business is to get users to engage with and take action on your pins. Engagement can mean anything from clicking on a pin to see it in detail, saving a pin to one of their boards, sharing a pin with a peer or even trying a pin idea out for themselves. All of this helps to create brand awareness and puts users in the very beginning stages of your sales funnel.

As a brand, you achieve this end goal by first creating great content which helps you become more discoverable and then you make your pins easy for users to take action on whether it’s just clicking on the pin, saving the pin, clicking through to a link attached to the pin, making a purchase, signing up to something or installing your app.

Pinterest Marketing

When it comes to Pinterest marketing for businesses, remember that marketing on Pinterest is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to approach it for its long-term benefits rather than trying to gain short-term results immediately. Especially since, as we discussed above, the life of pins on Pinterest are so much longer than the life of posts on other social media platforms, you need to be prepared to see pins through to the end of their lifecycle and not give up on them prematurely. Since Pinterest is a great place to start future customers off in your sales funnel, you also need to approach your Pinterest marketing strategy with customer relationship building at the forefront.

So, how do you do this? It all starts with creating great content – otherwise known as “pins” – to share on Pinterest. Unlike most social media platforms, success on Pinterest is not dependant on the number of followers your account has. Content on Pinterest has much more reach, and a reach that mimics the algorithm of search engines, so it’s much easier and more seamless for users to see and engage with your content even if they aren’t following you on Pinterest. This means that it’s still possible for brands to get excellent reach and engagement on their Pinterest content even if they don’t have a large following on the platform.

As Pinterest says in their article on Increasing Brand Awareness with Pinterest, “Brands with better content reach more people than brands with lots of followers,” which is excellent news for business merchants who are starting a new Pinterest business account but want to gain lots of traction from the platform and its users.

Naturally, the next step from here is understanding how to create great content on Pinterest. These are a few resources to help you achieve great content on Pinterest:

This article on How to Use Pinterest for Business from Co-Schedule, a social media scheduling platform, has really great information detailing how to actually design your pins, what makes them attractive for users to click on, eye-catching titles to use and how to make sure your pins directly represent the core of your brand.

This video from Pinterest explains the Art of the Pin and includes useful information on proper dimensions for pins, creating detailed and thoughtful descriptions, making pins actionable and more.

Pinterest’s Art of Making Boards video can help you understand more about knowing what kind of content to pin. It will help you make your pins more discoverable and more appealing to your audience’s interests.

This is a great introductory article on the Best Practices for Pinterest Success and discusses topics like how often to save pins, thinking like a pinner, naming boards wisely, correctly setting up pin landing pages, and more.

This 9-page guide on How to Make Great Pins talks in more depth about the important elements pins need to have to make them actionable, interesting and engaging for users.

In terms of actively making beautiful pins, Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design software that beginners can use to create pins for their own business. They even have a pin template already created so there’s no need to format an image to the perfect size for Pinterest, it’s already created!

If you’re familiar with Adobe Photoshop, it’s another tool you can use to create Pinterest content. If you want to use Photoshop to create your Pinterest images but need a crash course in how to actually use Photoshop, we recommend checking out Skillshare’s photoshop classes, a few of the best ones you can see curated in our 40+ Best Skillshare Classes for Business article.

Getting Started with Pinterest for Business

Now that you understand why Pinterest for business is so important and have more information on Pinterest marketing, the next step is to actually get your Pinterest business account up and running so you can start taking steps to drive brand awareness and traffic from Pinterest.

Here’s what you need to do to get your Pinterest for business account set up:

If, however, you don’t already have a personal Pinterest account or you want to start a fresh Pinterest for business account, you can create a Pinterest business account here. It doesn’t take long!

It’s important to create a business account on Pinterest because it’ll be more easily recognizable by your current and prospective customers and Pinterest business accounts also come with additional features such as advertising capabilities, Pinterest analytics, different pinning options and email updates for Pinterest for business features.

Claim Your Site

Claiming your website is an essential step to complete in order to connect your Pinterest business account and your website together. By confirming your site you’re able to:

Have your profile picture automatically added to any pins coming from your site

Get access to website analytics that tell you what content people are saving from your website to Pinterest

In their Best Practice Guide for Pinterest for business, Pinterest openly says that, “If you use and have a confirmed account, your pins appear higher in search results,” which makes your profile even more likely to be discovered by Pinterest users which is exactly what you want from your Pinterest for business account.

Claiming your website isn’t difficult, you just need to be able to access and edit your website’s HTML code. There are two ways to claim your site and it’s either by using a meta tag or by uploading an HTML file, the instructions for which can be found on Pinterest’s Claim Your Website help center page. Check out that page for all the instructions you need to claim your website and there’s also platform-specific set up instructions if you need help tailored to your particular ecommerce platform, such as Shopify or BigCommerce.

Add a Save Button to Your Site

Adding a Pinterest Save Button to your site is an easy way to get more of your content on Pinterest, simply by making it efficient for visitors to share images from your website to the platform.

The Pinterest Save Button is advantageous for a few reasons:

Every time a visitor on your site uses the Pinterest Save Button, they add more of your content to Pinterest

Every time a user saves a pin to their Pinterest boards with the Save Button, their followers will see it too which gives your content more exposure and promotes it to people with similar interests to that of your audience

It encourages users to save your pins to their boards when they may not have otherwise thought to do so

Once you install the Pinterest Save Button, a clickable logo will appear on your website’s images so visitors can click the logo and save your content directly to their own Pinterest boards.

There are two types of Save Buttons: Automatic Buttons which show the Pinterest Save Button icon on your images automatically so users know they can save that image to Pinterest, and there’s also the Hover Buttons which show the Pinterest Save Button icon on your images when users’ cursors hover over your images, so they’re a little more discreet but still signal to your visitors that the image can be saved to their Pinterest boards.

You can also change the look of the Pinterest Save Button so it matches your website’s branding, which is a nice touch to ensure it doesn’t stand out in a bad way from the rest of the content on your site. To configure the Save Button for your site, check out Pinterest’s Build a Save Button article from their help center.

When you have the Save Button installed you’ll be able to see in your Pinterest Analytics which images get saved to your visitors’ Pinterest boards, which is a sure way to tell what’s popular on your site and what your visitors are most interested in sharing.

You can also pre-populate the pin descriptions that users save to their own boards with the Pinterest Save Button. This makes it faster for users to save your images to their boards and means that all the correct, necessary and optimized information will be in the description which will make it more useful for other users who see the pin on Pinterest. If you don’t specify a description, Pinterest will pull a description from your webpage, which may not be as well optimized for Pinterest. To learn more about pre-filling your descriptions, check out this help page from Pinterest.

Build a Widget

Aside from the Pinterest Save Button, there are other widgets you can add to your site to make your content more shareable to Pinterest and more discoverable to other Pinterest users.

Widgets you can add to your website include:

A Follow Button: With this simple button you can encourage your website visitors to follow you on Pinterest, and by clicking the button on your website your visitors will be taken directly to your Pinterest profile where they can follow your account.

A Pin Widget: With this widget, you can embed one of your pins directly to your website, including the pin’s image, title and description.

A Profile Widget: Show up to 30 of the latest pins to your Pinterest profile with this widget that gives your website visitors a taste of what you share on Pinterest.

A Board Widget: Show up to 30 of the latest pins to your favorite Pinterest board with this widget that gives a preview of what kind of content you share to that board.

To learn how to add any of these widgets to your site with specific set up instructions, check out the Pinterest Widget Builder page to get started.

Automate Pinning

To execute a winning Pinterest marketing strategy, you need to be pinning consistently to Pinterest. It’s recommended to pin between 11-20 times per day which may seem like a lot, but as outlined in this Ultimate Pinterest Marketing Guide, 80% of the content can be content you re-pin from other users on Pinterest (and thus save to your own Pinterest boards) while only 20% of it should be original content.

To make sure you’re pinning content regularly to your Pinterest profile, automating the process can take off a lot of the stress of having to remember to post and making sure you have fresh content that’s going out. There are two ways you can automate your pinning strategy:

This is a slightly less automated option, but you can upload your content to Pinterest and save it to a “Secret” board that your followers – and any other users on Pinterest – cannot see, and then when you’re ready for the pin to go live to your Pinterest audience, you can re-pin the content to a non-secret board. You can’t automate the re-pinning process, you’ll have to do it manually, but at least your content will be ready to go in Pinterest, you just have to re-pin it to a non-secret board.

The 5 Types of Pins

Pinterest for business users have access to five different types of pins which each have different use cases and advantages.

Standard Pins

The standard type of pin on Pinterest is something business and non-business accounts can post to their profile and it shows up like any normal pin on Pinterest. These are the only types of pins non-business accounts can post to their profile, and all standard pins can be posted with a link, title and description attached to them.

Promoted Pins

Promoted pins are essentially advertisements that business accounts can pay for to guarantee reach to a certain audience. Any Pinterest business account can purchase a promoted pin, they look like standard pins on the interface and they work like typical PPC ads. One of the main advantages of promoted pins on Pinterest is that they actually get just as much, and sometimes even more, engagement than standard pins. Just because they’re an ad, it doesn’t detract users from engaging with the pin which is good news for brands. Learn more about Pinterest’s promoted pins here and the different audience targeting options here.

Rich Pins

Rich Pins are highly optimized standard pins that offer a better experience for the user. They provide more context about the pin depending on the category that the pin fits into, and they can only be created by Pinterest for business accounts.

There are four types of Rich Pins: App, Product, Recipe and Article, and they each have different features:

App Rich Pins: These Rich Pins show an “Install” button so users can download an app without having to leave Pinterest. This is an important call-to-action that standard pins aren’t able to offer. It’s important to note, however, that App Rich Pins are only compatible with iOS at the moment.

Recipe Rich Pins: These Rich Pins provide all the recipe information upfront like the ingredients list, cooking time and serving sizes so users can get a glimpse into the recipe’s requirements without having to search for it.

Article Rich Pins: These Rich Pins make it clear where the article has been sourced from and what it’s about by detailing the headline, author and description of the article.

All of the information Rich Pins provide is showcased directly with the pin image itself, so users don’t have to click anywhere to find this information. It’s easily accessible and helps enrich the user’s experience on Pinterest.

Rich Pins are a little more tricky to implement than any other type of pin as business accounts need to apply for them. You need to have one URL validated to apply for Rich Pins on your entire domain and once you’ve applied, any content on your site with metadata will turn into a Rich Pin when a user saves it.

Buyable Pins

Selling your products on Pinterest is free (Pinterest doesn’t even take a cut of your sales) and you can do it with Buyable Pins. This type of pin allows Pinterest users to purchase your products on Pinterest without ever having to actually leave Pinterest!

They work for both mobile and desktop Pinterest users and they also integrate with your ecommerce platform, so you can handle the order processing like you normally do. To learn more about Buyable Pins, check out the Pinterest Business Buyable Pins article.

Shop the Look Pins

Shop the Look Pins are exclusive to the fashion and home decor sections of Pinterest and they allow users to easily find and purchase items from the pin. Users can recognize Shop the Look Pins by the small white dots that call out the items in the pin that are for sale, and users can tap the white dot to be directed to the website where they can purchase the item.

Shop the Look Pins can be used by influencers and businesses and they’re a great way to make the shopping experience more efficient for the user. To learn more about Shop the Look Pins, check out the Pinterest Business Shop the Look Pins article.

Growing Your Reach with Pinterest Marketing

In order to create growth for your brand and your bottom line through Pinterest marketing, these are some very key insights to take into consideration.

Firstly, only posting images of your product photos, although not an entirely poor Pinterest marketing strategy, is not ideal because it will only help you acquire a limited volume of users rather than grow your user base. To acquire volume and growth, you need to be pinning product-specific content (like product photos) as well as content that’s inclusive of your product but not solely trying to sell the product itself. This will help you create new customers rather than simply acquire existing ones.

What this means is that you need to focus less on the product itself and more on the use-case of the product.

For example, instead of pinning a product photo of your brand’s lawn mower that includes a title describing the type of lawn mower that it is, a description detailing the lawn mower’s capabilities and including a link back to your lawn mower’s product page, it’s a more effective Pinterest marketing strategy to pin an image of your lawn mower actually mowing a lawn with a title that says something to the effect of “How to Get Perfectly Cut Golf Course Grass at Home” including a description that discusses what perfectly cut, golf course-like grass is and how this lawn mower can help you achieve it, and then link to your lawn mower’s product page.

These are two vastly different approaches to the same end result – getting users to click on the pin and go through to your lawn mower’s product page – but the first example will only help you acquire users who were interested in finding a lawn mower in the first place, while the second example will help you appeal to users interested in having a beautiful lawn and a well-kept home. By appealing to user’s interests through this type of content on Pinterest, they’ll be more inclined to purchase your product because you’ve demonstrated how your product can help them achieve the results they want.

Like Pinterest discusses in their Tips for Creating Customer Growth on Pinterest article, “too often, online marketing tactics focus on customers who already know what they want to buy—instead of expanding their reach to also include people earlier in their shopping journey,” which is an extremely important perspective to keep in mind when creating content for your Pinterest marketing strategy. To grow your reach on Pinterest, you need to focus on the early steps in a user’s shopping journey and that starts by telling a story and creating a need for the user to make them want to purchase your product to fulfill that need.

How to Use Pincodes Strategically

Pincodes are a unique code that work similarly to QR Codes and they help people find your brand and products on Pinterest. Pincodes can be placed on any of your physical brand assets like brochures, business cards, packaging and displays and whenever people scan them with their Pinterest app, it’ll direct them to your content destination on Pinterest.

By using Pincodes, you can help people find your brand, products, pins and boards more easily on Pinterest, and you can use them as an interactive tool to engage users with your Pinterest profile.

Auto: Use Pincodes in showrooms to show off new features and functionality.

To learn more about how to create Pincodes, how to scan them, and best practices for using Pincodes, check out the Pinterest for Business Pincodes article.

Optimizing Pinterest Pins: Pinterest SEO Strategies

Ultimately Pinterest is a search engine, and although it’s a search engine for images there are Search Engine Optimization techniques that can be used by brands to make pins more discoverable by users on Pinterest. If you want to get the most reach from your pins, use these Pinterest SEO strategies to get the most optimal results.

Keywords

Even though Pinterest is primarily a search engine for images, the titles and descriptions of pins is how users will be able to discover your content on Pinterest.

To make your pins discoverable by users, optimizing your pin titles and descriptions with keywords will help Pinterest suggest your content as a search result when relevant. We discussed Keyword Research in depth in our Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research article, and although it’s tailored towards finding keywords for search engines like Google, the same principles apply to finding keywords for Pinterest. Your Pinterest marketing keyword strategy, however, should be to use as many keywords as possible whenever and wherever relevant so your content can be discoverable by as many users as possible searching for pins like yours.

To start finding keywords to use in your pin titles and descriptions, use a tool like KWFinder to discover highly searched and competitive keywords right now and check out our KWFinder Review to learn about the features and services they offer.

Hashtags

Hashtags work similarly to keywords in that they help your pins be discoverable by Pinterest users. In this Ultimate Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest, hashtags have been described as being more of a categorical element, and less of a tool to help your content show up in Pinterest search results, so don’t rely on them as heavily as you would keywords to get your content in front of searching users.

A few words of warnings for hashtags addressed in the article: Hashtags are clickable on Pinterest, so they can take users away from your content, just because you use a hashtag doesn’t mean Pinterest will index it so use keywords instead for that purpose, and there’s evidence that suggests that they might reduce the value of your pin in search results if you use too many hashtags, so only use one or two per pin, if any.

Pin Engagement

Engagement between your followers and your pins helps Pinterest determine which of your content resonates with users the most, and the more engagement your content receives by your followers the more Pinterest will show it on the site in places like search results, feeds, and recommendations. This is discussed in Pinterest’s Best Practices for Pinterest Success article, so if you’re interested to learn more then check it out.

Pin Imagery

Pinterest makes it very clear that vertical aspect ratio is imperative when creating content for Pinterest audiences. Pins on Pinterest are recommended to be 2:3 — 600px wide x 900px high. These are the ideal dimensions so users can see the image in the best possible way. Vertical images also prove to be better for engagement because they take up more space in Pinterest’s kanban format, which takes up more real estate on users’ devices which is ideal for brands. Pinterest discusses the importance of the vertical aspect ratio and proper dimensions in their Creative Approach to Pinterest article.

Pin Descriptions

Even though Pinterest is a visual search engine, descriptions are what help users find what they’re looking for when they search for specific content on Pinterest using keywords. When creating descriptions for your pins, besides using keywords that users are searching for (which you can discover by using a tool like KWFinder) make sure that every pin’s description is evergreen so it has the greatest amount of lasting potential.

As we discussed at the beginning of the article, content on Pinterest successfully gains engagement and shows up as a search result for months, so the content of your titles and descriptions need to be able to withstand that test of time. Titles and descriptions that are evergreen – as in, they don’t date themselves or refer to a very specific day or time of the year – have greater lasting potential. Some content on Pinterest will be season specific, such as content for recurring holidays, and that’s okay, but think about how you can even make descriptions for seasonal pins stay relevant for the same time of year next year.

Pinterest Analytics for Business

An important part of any marketing strategy is analytics, and that’s no different for Pinterest marketing. Pinterest offers a full suite of analytics options that can help you determine what’s working in your Pinterest marketing strategy and what needs some improvement.

With your Pinterest for business account, you can view analytics like what pins people are liking on your profile and what they save from your website, and you can learn more about what content users would like to see more of from your profile. You can also discover your audience metrics including their demographic information and what their other interests are.

If you’re interested in refining your Pinterest marketing strategy and getting insight into your audience, check out Pinterest Analytics with your Pinterest for business account.

Pinterest for Business Resources

Like we said at the beginning of this article, Pinterest is optimized for brands because Pinterest users love to discover new products and businesses on the platform, so Pinterest makes it easy for businesses to use it to promote their products and brand. Because of this, they have plenty of great resources that can help you optimize your Pinterest marketing strategy and get the most out of your Pinterest for business account.

Conclusion

This article has hopefully given you some insight into everything Pinterest offers for businesses and how businesses can make use of Pinterest to grow their reach and get Pinterest users started in their sales funnel. Pinterest marketing can be a lucrative way to grow your sales and revenue, but it all starts with creating great content that users can enjoy and focusing on the use-case of products rather than just the products themselves. Get started with Pinterest for business and see how you can grow your brand awareness in ways you’ve never done before.

About the author

The A Better Lemonade Stand Content Team focuses on writing comprehensive, actionable, practical and resourceful content for our audience of ecommerce entrepreneurs wherever they are in the process of building, launching and growing their own ecommerce businesses.

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